Researchers from National Laboratory. Lawrence Berkeley (USA) We have developed a new technology to accelerate electrons in a plasma accelerator with a laser. This method uses two laser pulses: one heats the plasma and creates a channel in it, another impulse accelerates the electrons in the created channel.
Using this approach, scientists managed to accelerate electrons to an energy 7,8 GeV in a plasma channel about 20 cm. For example, conventional accelerators, operating on the principle of interaction of charged particles with magnetic and electric fields, it would take hundreds of meters.
Physicists from the Institute of Applied Mathematics named after. MV. Welcome to RAN, who performed numerical simulation of laser-plasma interactions.
At present, the technology of acceleration of charged particles by an electromagnetic field is well developed and actively used.. These devices are indispensable tools in many areas.. Accelerators are used in studies of particle interactions and their properties, sterilization of medical equipment, radiotherapy, radiocarbon analysis, radiation flaw detection. But high-energy accelerators take up a lot of space and require large financial investments.. for example, known to many The Large Hadron Collider has a ring almost 27 km, and its annual budget is 1,2 US$ billion plus experiment costs.
Laser-plasma acceleration is built on a different principle. The first laser pulse in a 20 cm sapphire tube, in which the acceleration process takes place, the plasma is heated and a plasma channel with a diameter of tens of micrometers is created. Then a second laser pulse is passed through the channel, creating plasma waves in its path, on which electrons "roll". Laser, passing through the plasma, pushes away only light electrons, and heavy ions remain motionless. Due to this separation of particles, charge density waves are formed with a large electric field strength. plasma waves, following the laser pulse in the corresponding phase, disperse particles much faster, than electromagnetic accelerators. And the more powerful the impulse, the faster the acceleration. this method, by analogy with the wake, formed behind a moving ship, called the wake acceleration.
Although there are still many problems to be solved, this method is a big step in the creation of cheaper and more compact laser plasma accelerators and allows them to be implemented in the creation of new technologies, eg, desktop X-ray lasers and compact high-power light sources.
